Mapping the regeneration of over-farmed and polluted land given over to the wild in 2000, this is a welcome story about nature’s ability to just get on with it
You’ll never look at a green and pleasant pasture in the same way again after watching this documentary about the rewilding project at the Knepp estate in West Sussex. The land belongs to Sir Charles Burrell, 10th baronet (he goes by plain old Charlie), who was in his 20s when he inherited the five-and-a-half square mile estate. The plan was to follow in the family tradition of farming, but the heavy clay soil at Knepp didn’t suit modern intensive methods so, in 2000, £1.5m in debt, Burrell and his conservationist wife, Isabella Tree, sold the cows and let everything go to seed.
Looking at Knepp’s unruly landscape today, all thorny scrubland, brambles and little mounds dug by who knows which critter,...
You’ll never look at a green and pleasant pasture in the same way again after watching this documentary about the rewilding project at the Knepp estate in West Sussex. The land belongs to Sir Charles Burrell, 10th baronet (he goes by plain old Charlie), who was in his 20s when he inherited the five-and-a-half square mile estate. The plan was to follow in the family tradition of farming, but the heavy clay soil at Knepp didn’t suit modern intensive methods so, in 2000, £1.5m in debt, Burrell and his conservationist wife, Isabella Tree, sold the cows and let everything go to seed.
Looking at Knepp’s unruly landscape today, all thorny scrubland, brambles and little mounds dug by who knows which critter,...
- 6/11/2024
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
Knepp estate was £1.5m in debt. Now it thrums with wildlife, visitors flock there – and farmers are stampeding to copy its success. We meet the star of a captivating film about this amazing rebirth
Take a stroll through the classic English countryside of West Sussex, and you’ll notice things becoming strange just beyond the village of Dial Post. Here, a patchwork of tidy fields bordered by neat hedgerows becomes a bamboozling maze of flowery glades and thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn and sallow. Rabbits dart between billowing brambles, watched by a fallow deer sporting furry new antlers. Stranger than the unexpectedly abundant plants and mammals is the cacophony of birdsong – the common melodies of thrushes, robins and blackcaps but also songs virtually extinguished across Britain: cuckoos, nightingales and turtle doves. Oddest of all is a clacking noise that sounds like two hollow sticks being banged together.
“Isn’t it a great sound?...
Take a stroll through the classic English countryside of West Sussex, and you’ll notice things becoming strange just beyond the village of Dial Post. Here, a patchwork of tidy fields bordered by neat hedgerows becomes a bamboozling maze of flowery glades and thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn and sallow. Rabbits dart between billowing brambles, watched by a fallow deer sporting furry new antlers. Stranger than the unexpectedly abundant plants and mammals is the cacophony of birdsong – the common melodies of thrushes, robins and blackcaps but also songs virtually extinguished across Britain: cuckoos, nightingales and turtle doves. Oddest of all is a clacking noise that sounds like two hollow sticks being banged together.
“Isn’t it a great sound?...
- 6/6/2024
- by Patrick Barkham
- The Guardian - Film News
"The whole landscape was breathing a sigh of relief. You could hear it." MetFilm has revealed the official UK trailer for a documentary film tiled Wilding, an adaptation of the book of the same name from Isabella Tree. The film is a compelling look at a dying landscape that is healed against all odds, going on to thrive in astonishing ways. The book describes the creation of Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England. The 3,500 acres wildland project was created in the grounds of Knepp Castle, where they torn down all the fences and let nature take over again. This almost seems like the British doc version of The Biggest Little Farm doc about a couple creating a sustainable farm in California. Wilding directed by five-time Emmy Award-winner David Allen, with cinematography by multi-bafta & Emmy Award-winning DPs Tim Cragg and Simon de Glanville. And featuring a score...
- 4/10/2024
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Met Film Sales has acquired international rights to David Allen’s nature documentary Wilding, which it will introduce to buyers at next week’s European Film Market.
Met Film Distribution, the company’s distribution arm, will release the film theatrically in the UK this summer. Submarine negotiated the deal with MetFilm on behalf of the filmmakers, and will handle the North American sale.
Wilding is based on Isabella Tree’s 2018 book Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, in which Tree details the efforts of herself and her husband to renew the ecosystem on their estate, Knepp, after decades of intensive agriculture.
Met Film Distribution, the company’s distribution arm, will release the film theatrically in the UK this summer. Submarine negotiated the deal with MetFilm on behalf of the filmmakers, and will handle the North American sale.
Wilding is based on Isabella Tree’s 2018 book Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, in which Tree details the efforts of herself and her husband to renew the ecosystem on their estate, Knepp, after decades of intensive agriculture.
- 2/6/2024
- ScreenDaily
Taking the fashionable genre as a starting point, Ric Rawlings’ film tries to elevate amateurism in three creepy rural stories but it just looks inept
Those interested in the concept of rewilding, a form of environmental conservation that seeks to restore land to a more natural state as popularised by the book by Isabella Tree, should be well advised that this film has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is an almost endearingly amateurish package, written and directed by Ric Rawlins, that is an exercise in something that’s almost as fashionable these days: folk horror. There’s lashings of folk horror about these days, some of it, like Enys Men, very good. Rewilding, however, is not very good, if we are being honest. But it’s as folky as you get, telling three disconnected stories set in the West Country and Wales revolving around such folky elements as spooky coastal caves,...
Those interested in the concept of rewilding, a form of environmental conservation that seeks to restore land to a more natural state as popularised by the book by Isabella Tree, should be well advised that this film has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is an almost endearingly amateurish package, written and directed by Ric Rawlins, that is an exercise in something that’s almost as fashionable these days: folk horror. There’s lashings of folk horror about these days, some of it, like Enys Men, very good. Rewilding, however, is not very good, if we are being honest. But it’s as folky as you get, telling three disconnected stories set in the West Country and Wales revolving around such folky elements as spooky coastal caves,...
- 1/31/2023
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
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